greek · wisdom

Plato's Timaeus — The Creation of the World

c. 360 BCE · Classical Greek · Athens

The Opening — On the Eternal and the Temporal

1What is that which always is and has no becoming;

2And what is that which is always becoming and never is?

3That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state;

4But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason,

5Is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

6Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause,

7For without a cause nothing can be created.

8The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable

9And fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern,

10Must necessarily be made fair and perfect;

11But when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern,

12It is not fair or perfect.

The Demiurge — The Craftsman God

13Was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning?

14Or created, and had it a beginning?

15Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body,

16And therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense

17And are in a process of creation and created.

18Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause.

19Who then is the maker and father of this universe?

20To find the maker and father of all is a hard task,

21And when found, it would be impossible to declare him to all.

22Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation.

23He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything.

24And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be.

25This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world,

26As we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men:

27God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad,

28So far as this was attainable.

The World-Soul

29In the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body,

30Making it also to be the exterior environment of it;

31And he made the world one visible animal comprehending within itself all other animals.

32Out of the indivisible and unchangeable, and also out of that which is divisible

33And has to do with material bodies, he compounded a third and intermediate kind of essence,

34Partaking of the nature of the same and of the other,

35And this compound he placed accordingly in a mean between the indivisible,

36And the divisible and material.

37When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made

38Moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods,

39He rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original.

40And as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be.

41Now the nature of the ideal being was everlasting,

42But to bestow this attribute in its fulness upon a creature was impossible.

43Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity,

44And when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number,

45While eternity itself rests in unity;

46And this image we call time.

The Elements and the Structure of the World

47First, then, as regards fire and earth and water and air,

48Their nature and their transformations —

49He who is to inform us about their nature in detail has a very difficult task.

50But this much is clear: fire has the property of heat,

51Water the property of moisture,

52Earth of stability, and air of mobility.

53Each of the four elements was assigned by the creator

54To a region of the world: fire to the heavens,

55Earth to the ground beneath our feet,

56Water to the places between,

57Air filling all the rest.

58And the world was fashioned so that it might be most beautiful and most good,

59A single, perfect, self-sufficient living creature.

On Human Souls

60Now the creator had made the universe; and next he proceeded to make human souls.

61The composition of the souls was not the same as before,

62But in the second and third place —

63As the mixture was not so pure.

64And when he had compounded the whole, he divided it up into souls equal in number to the stars,

65And assigned each soul to a star.

66And placing them as in a vehicle, he showed them the nature of the universe,

67And declared to them the laws of destiny.

68According to the laws of justice, he who lived well should return to the habitation of his star,

69And have a blessed and congenial existence.

70But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman.

71And if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil,

72He would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature,

73Until the reason which was in him reasserted its sway.

notes

The Timaeus is Plato's dialogue on cosmology, natural philosophy, and the origin of the universe. Composed around 360 BCE, it is the most influential text in Western philosophy on the structure of the cosmos and the nature of the divine. The dialogue is presented as a speech by Timaeus of Locri, who describes how the Demiurge (the divine craftsman) fashioned the visible world by looking to the eternal Forms as a template. The Demiurge is good but not omnipotent — he works with pre-existing chaotic matter, imposing mathematical order on it. He creates the World-Soul (anima mundi), a mathematical structure that animates the cosmos, and then creates time as "a moving image of eternity." Individual human souls are fragments of the World-Soul, assigned to stars and incarnated in bodies to learn virtue through experience. The Timaeus was the only Platonic dialogue directly available to Latin-reading scholars in the medieval West (through Chalcidius's partial translation), and it profoundly shaped Christian theology's conception of creation, the soul, and the rational order of nature. The parallels with Genesis (creation by a divine craftsman, the ordering of chaos) were noted by ancient authors and fuelled the tradition of "Plato Hebraicus" — the idea that Plato had read the Hebrew scriptures in Egypt. Translation after Benjamin Jowett (1871). Public domain.

currently held: Manuscript tradition

CosmologyAfterlifePhilosophyGreek MythCreation

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